Army begins treating PTSD in the field

Army begins treating PTSD in the field

By Mike Tharp | McClatchy Newspapers

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Never has the U.S. military been forced to confront so much of "the battle behind the battle" — the psychic and emotional wounds of war. What's more, grunts no longer bear the brunt of such attacks; thanks to suicide bombers and homemade bombs, drivers, cooks and other rear-echelon troops have also been killed and wounded.

A recent Rand Corp. study (criticized by the military for relying on too small a sample), calculated that some 300,000 out of 1.6 million veterans of these two wars have suffered some sort of PTSD or TBI, traumatic brain injury, which used to be called a concussion.

Nor has the military ever faced such sharp criticism for its handling, or mishandling, of the mental well-being of its troops, but never before have commanders and their troops dealt with the problems and the stigma of PTSD more directly than they've begun doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For one thing, it's cheaper to treat PTSD than it is to train a new recruit. For another, said Bourque: "The healthier their personnel, the better off the Army is."

Now the Army identifies a condition called Acute Stress Reaction (ASR) — the immediate aftermath of a traumatic incident in a combat zone. Since PTSD takes months, sometimes years, to manifest itself, military doctors and counselors prefer the new term to describe what they regard as normal reactions among troops confronted by abnormal situations.

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